My teacher is from Taiwan, so that's what I'm learning. I do think it looks a lot better and it's honestly not that much harder to master.

Japanese are taught a total of 2,928 characters throughout primary & secondary school. I've learned all of those plus at least another 100 other uncommon & rare characters.

Hmm, I thought it was 1 945 characters.

What I prefer to do is memorize the stroke order through repetition and memorize the sound/meaning by associating the character with an image of what it is. My textbook uses this approach to a great extent.

I'm not fluent in either Japanese or Korean; I consider myself an intermediate in both.

That's still impressive because I consider those two of the hardest languages there are (understood as languages Anglophones study). I take it you picked up the bulk of it in Korea?

Do you plan on living in Japan? If I didn't I'd probably learn them on a need-to-know basis.

I do plan on living in Japan, eventually. That's why I felt like I needed to learn those extra characters.

Talib wrote:Which brings up interesting question: How many Chinese characters will I need to know...

Wikipedia saya that about 2,000 are needed for basic literacy (for example, to read a Chinese newspaper), & a well-educated person will know well in excess of 4,000 to 5,000 characters.

Talib wrote:

Yeah, but at the time I wasn't that motivated to learn it.

It's a shame though because you're not likely to have a better opportunity to use your Korean, right?

Did you live in Seoul?

Yeah, I probably won't get a better opportunity. There are a lot of Koreans in Japan but many of them are monolingual in Japanese...I lived in a city called Suwon (kor: 수원/水原) which is the capital city of Gyeonggi Province (kor: 경기도/京畿道). Suwon is part of the Seoul National Capital Area.

Sobekhotep wrote:Wikipedia says that about 2,000 are needed for basic literacy (for example, to read a Chinese newspaper), & a well-educated person will know well in excess of 4,000 to 5,000 characters.

That's what I mean. I'm not sure how many I'll need for my needs - do I want to read Chinese literature, for example?

Yeah, I probably won't get a better opportunity. There are a lot of Koreans in Japan but many of them are monolingual in Japanese...

Well, Korea's not far. But the Japanese are a very homogeneous people, aren't they.

I lived in a city called Suwon (kor: 수원/水原) which is the capital city of Gyeonggi Province (kor: 경기도/京畿道). Suwon is part of the Seoul National Capital Area.